If you are a business with an online presence, it is important that your website and other online services are available 24/7, all year round.

Regardless, there is going to come a time when your managed, dedicated or hosted site is going to go down for some reason.

This pretty much states the obvious, but if you are off the Internet, for whatever reason, then you are off the radar.  You become invisible.

One way to monitor your web site’s presence is with Pingdom. It’s a terrific monitoring service that will alert you to any problem with your website will be discovered the minute it happens. You will be immediately alerted so you can take action before it affects your business.

You will also be able to see detailed statistics of your website performance, giving you a historical record of all incidents.

If you are a business, you can sign up for a free trial here.

PeoplePerHour with Alan Weinkrantz

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Alan: This is Alan Weinkrantz for dedicatedhosting.com I’m in London with Simos Kitris he’s the chief technical officer of peopleperhour.com. Welcome!

Simos: Thank you.

Alan: Simos you’re doing something really interesting in helping to give people really an option and lots of alternatives in their work environment. Tell us a little about your company and what you’re doing.

Simos: Thanks Alan, we’d like to think so as well. Here at peopleperhour.com we essentially help an online marketplace which enables people to work remotely and offer their services on a per-hour basis, and that applies to a variety of clients most of which are startups and small businesses. The services span a very wide range from the more traditional programming web design, but more so the last year or so, we’ve seen a lot of the mining areas like sales, marketing, PR, and I guess the downturn is helping us in the way that clients are looking for more cost-effective options to out-source work and get things done. One of the things that are very different about us compared to traditional out-sourcing, where you typically outsource a function or a department to an external company, is that we have a lot of people on the side that do offer their services as what we call “five to niners” – the traditional moonlighting. So it’s not really about us finding a company that’s a million miles away to outsource work to, it’s about finding somebody that has the right skills that could be even a few miles down the road that has the time and the skills to do your work.

Alan: So, talk about your dedicated hosting strategy. What’s your approach?

Simos: The approach we took very early on is that we really didn’t want to deal with complex mining service in-house. We didn’t have to worry about things like service getting stolen from our offices… having the staff to maintain the service. So from day one we instead dedicated hosting to help us grow, we’re trying to keep our business as lean as possible as the name lies peopleperhour.com we use a little freelancers, and then our [strategy] I guess in the hosting world would be to use an external party to manage our hosting for us.

Alan: So Simos you… it seems like you’ve really got your business up and going, your business model down really well here in the UK but you told me you’re also starting to grow worldwide.

Simos: Yes, absolutely Alan. We started by marketing more in the UK and that’s still the case. In the last 6 months we’ve had a lot of clients come from the US, Australia, South Africa, mostly European countries, and [in tradition] you always have freelancers from 120 countries… more than 120 countries actually right now, without even marketing at all to them. So, most of them find us on the web. You can find our website by going to www.peopleperhour.com. Lots of them get referred by word of mouth, and I guess through the marketing efforts that they do. And it’s really very encouraging to see that there are people in all areas of the world that can now offer their services to the side and also get things done. The last 3 months we’ve seen a very big surge of projects that have been awarded to UK freelancers. It’s something that’s just encouraging us, it came as a surprise to us. So it seems that the dynamics of the worldwide global marketplace are changing, if you’d like.

Alan: And one more time your URL.

Simos: It’s www.peopleperhour.com

Alan: Great, well thanks for your time this morning.

Simos: Thank you very much.

Lemon Computing with Alan Weinkrantz

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Alan: This is Alan Weinkrantz.  I’m here in London with Clinton Byrne and Martijn Dekkers with Lemon Computing, good morning.

Martijn: Good morning.

Clinton: Good morning.

Alan: Tell us a little bit about your business.  Tell us what you do because you actually have several interesting activities that you’re involved in.

Clinton: Lemon Computings been going for about ten years.  We started as a small IT company just providing desktop support for certain organizations and Lemon has been growing over the years.  We now provide a one-stop solution for our customers ranging from desktop support to network implementation, open-source telephone systems, CRM development.  So really we are sort of a one-stop shop providing all the necessities that businesses of today require.  We like to take on the responsibility, therefore there is one port of call, we don’t like shipping our customers around.  Lemon’s main focus is reducing the cost of ownership of IT solutions to our customers, and through this we constantly tap the market for new and innovative ideas and technologies to benefit the customer.

Martin: Yep, a lot of our work involves hosting systems for customers.  This ranges from email systems to simple websites all the way down to dedicated applications that we build, deliver, host, and manage for our customers.  We do a lot of CRM hosting, which is an area that we’ve specialized in.  We’ve taken a sugar CRM, Outback, and we kind of squeezed it to our own process, and we optimize our service [tactics] for hosting sugar CRMs. Right now we’re hosting probably one of the fastest sugar CRMs services around, even as the interest of sugar themselves who are looking to work with us on this front.  Hosting is a lot more than simply taking a server and switching it get some software running on it, and off you go even though that was a popular model quite a few years ago.  We’re increasingly seeing customers realizing there’s much more to it than that, there’s on-going maintenance, security issues, there are accessibility issues as the whole concept of the cloud is growing people are increasingly used to having access to their information not just in their office but everywhere they go.  A lot of our customers are more and more switched on to the value of dedicated hosting, likewise our business is looking after our customers, and it’s application development, and it’s ensuring that we deliver value to our customers.  And our business is not running data centers and airco and your [] power systems and whatever you’ve got.  So we like to work with [barcos] for hosting

Alan: So, you know, we’re coming into a new year.  The economy seems to be falling if you will.  What would you give advice to… what kind of advice would you give to growing companies looking at dedicated hosting?

Martins: Well as it’s… it’s the opposite of advice that we started dishing out a while back.  As the economy has slowed down, as the economy was contracting and organizations had to contract their operations dedicated hosting gave us the flexibility to scale operations down without actually shutting people down, and the same advice goes now.  Using dedicated hosting solutions we’re able to ramp and scale customers up as quickly as their business requires – literally overnight provided they have the right applications, the right tools, and the right architecture and things.

Alan: And Clinton, how do people find you on the internet?

Clinton: You can go to www.lemon-computing.com.

Alan: Thanks for you time this afternoon.

Clinton: Thank you.

Martin: It’s been a pleasure, thank you.